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Invisible

Apparently Google has decided my gallery site, alexanderwild.com, isn’t worth listing. Yesterday I was the #1 hit for “insect photography”. Today, nothing. It’s like the site never existed.

Needless to say, invisibility is not good. I am looking into it.

[update 2/12] I’m back to being visible again! Possibly, the problem was the way I’d set my custom domain to point to Smugmug’s servers, which may have lead Google’s algorithms to conclude I was spammy. I fixed it, and within hours I was back in the ranks.

It might be a smugmug problem. After I read your post I checked my site margygreen.com too (also hosted by smugmug). It is also now invisible to google. Even searching my name directly yields nothing from my smugmug site. Normally the first several link pages would be exclusively mine when searching my name and variants of my name. Please let me know what you find out as I apparently have the same problem.

Rankings change all the time, mostly because the particular search engine changes their algorithms. We’re usually #1 for “Plants of Hawaii”, but not always.

There are still 107,000 URL’s indexed at Google for your website. Enter the following in Google, or any search engine, to see indexed URLs.
site:www.alexanderwild.com

If you care to know more about the status of your website through Google’s eyes, set your site up on Google Webmasters. They will send you messages if things are critically wrong or need attention.http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Try not to worry about ranking too much. Provide good content, and good things will follow.

While I appreciate the suggestions, this seems to be a far more drastic change than mere tweaking of the algorithm. That I’ve gone from near the top to basically nothing- my images don’t even come up in an image search- suggests that they’ve not just dropped my rank but actively flagged my site.

Alexanderwild.com is linked by some very high profile places. University websites, National Geographic, Scientific American, etc. I should be registering somewhere above, rather than below, Nigerian link farms.

“If you care to know more about the status of your website through Google’s eyes, set your site up on Google Webmasters. They will send you messages if things are critically wrong or need attention.”http://www.google.com/webmasters/

If you haven’t yet done this, you’re missing out on quite a bit, including potentially critical error messages from Google.

ps. At our peak, when our images were at hear.org, we got 300,000 page views a month from 80,000 unique visitors. We currently use robots.txt to actively shun search engines from much of our lower level content, since we were overloading the servers they now reside on.